On EQD · 11:36am Jun 20th, 2017
Hm. Seems to be a day for this.
So Wanderer D visited one of my podcasts (specifically The Place of Fanfic Readings in the Fandom with DrWolf) and left a cryptic comment that led me to this blog about EQD erasing the the 'No Fanfic Mode' from its site.
Not ten minutes later while doing the daily 'holy shit why do I have so many emails? Delete delete delete' thing, I discovered four of my latest fic readings have been put onto EQD.
Not in a fanfic reading post. Oh no, no, no. Shoved into a round-up.
Now, I don't really use EQD anymore. I fell out with the site and its values and practises a long time ago. I got rather sick of the fact that a fansite made by fans for fans and about fans would sideline things multiple people had worked really hard on (fanfics, audio dramas, animations etc) and instead devote entire posts to ... well, this sort of thing. My hopes were raised a little when comic dubs and fanfic readings (aka the things that got me into this fandom) started to get dedicated group posts that construed the same level of importance as dedicated PMV, Tumblr, music and other posts.
And then the fanfic reading posts disappeared.
Apparently because they've been shoved back into the nightly round-up posts. Something I discovered only when someone linked me to this post: a round-up that contains four of my own full-cast readings and, among other things, a full animation.
Am I talking right now based on sour grapes? Oh, you better fucking believe it. To many fans first coming to this fandom, EQD is still their hub, or at least their first port of call, and EQD still seems to sideline anything and everything to do with fanfiction. It's 2017 now. Have we really not progressed beyond that mindset?
Ugh.
Tl;dr - EQD remains a circlejerk and will live in its 2011 mindset forever. Good for them. Now where is my bucket of vole feces and monkey vomit to put in their beds?
Yeah, I hear you on that.
I don’t think EqD’s ever told someone to redraw half of a picture or redo half of a video before they allow it onto EqD, either.
To think that i got all my fanfics from there back before fimfiction existed and people still just linked to google docs xD
Damn, i stopped visiting the site like years ago.
Loading trebuchet with hydra butt chocolate and aiming at EqD. Arrrr, gun-site won't depress low enough to line them up!
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And how! A twenty minute reading takes 30-60 minutes to properly record narration and each five minutes of finished audio takes one to three hours to edit depending on complexity.
There's a lovely group called I hate EQD that I'm sure would love to help pile on the salt.
I still find it a pretty useful resource. Shrug.
I have never visited that site, but based on how much hatred everypony has for it (and with good reason), I never will.
EquestruaDaily can go drown itself in a large vat of Dracinaquis poo in the darkest depths of Tarturus!
It is in the fridge next to the leftovers. Careful not to mix the two up again.
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But the leftover blue cheese and picked platypus beaks are for extra zest!
Blood shall be spilt this day. Scribbler, I shall avenge you and your beautiful work by breaking all EqD moderators hands...with my face!
I tried submitting fics to EQD a few times, but always got rejected for things that ranged from "nitpicking" to "reader obviously just skimmed and missed important details".
Gave up and stuck with FIMFic.
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The amount of quality you and most other readers put into your work is just as powerful as these new pony games coming out (often more so). And I'm saying that as someone working on one!
I just wish I understood why they're doing this. For the animation trailer for "Mare Who Once Lived On the Moon," they never once mentioned in their article that it's based on a story. Most of the people didn't even know it.
I'm just confused.
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Well, if you'd like, you can use those and I'll make you up a nice dinner when you get back from using those feces and vomit properly.
Wait. Those are just... pictures of faces. That's it.
Good fucking lord that's ridiculous. EQD's attitude towards fanfic and fanfic-related content is bullshit.
Unfortunately, it's been that way for a while now. I don't even know which sections to check anymore because sometimes they're posted to the audio books section while other times they are posted in the nightly roundups. Since they really don't seem to be in a hurry to be posting that type of content in my experience, I really can't muster a lot of anger because this is just how it's been for me. Been waiting for them to feature a set of story reading I did that they told me they were going to add two months ago. I just reminded them last night.
I hope that they just forgot and weren't intentionally foregoing their pledge.
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But what we will placed in their beds tonight if we use that?
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. . . should, by rights, be the site's unofficial motto.
I refuse to give my business to EQD. They disrespect our piece of the community for years, and only now change their tune? No. Screw them.
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By rights, and also by merit, I sometimes feel.
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I don't understand your point. I mean, on a basic level, we don't have artists and musicians screening that content. But it's all on a yes-or-no basis. Fanfiction could be that way, too. Then instead of giving authors feedback to tune up their stories, we could just give a flat "no." Then all media are on an equal footing. Would you prefer that? It's also obviously very much more time-consuming to read a story than to listen to a song or look at a piece of art, so it's asking a lot more investment from the audience. Fanfiction and readings take a long time to evaluate. So I'd think it'd be more important to make sure they're good.
To the OP, though, I'm not on the blog side of things, so I don't know anything about posting readings, but I do know that Seth is constantly wishing he had more ready-to-post content like that. Personally, I'd love to see a regular feature of readings. The real reason that started as a semi-regular feature that fell away is that whoever was compiling that content got too busy and nobody else was available to cover it. Lack of people with time is usually the answer to questions about why something hasn't been sustained, and then it gets dumped in a catch-all post because nobody's around to segregate it. If you'd want to take the initiative to collate good readings and make a regular feature out of them, I'd be happy to help however I can to get them posted.
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That was more of a half-formed “just woke up and saw the blog post so gripe about the first thing that came to mind” post―more concerning personal frustrations while sympathizing with the gist of the blog.
My personal feelings aren’t necessarily rational, nor do I expect them to be. Especially not that early in the morning.
EQD is much smaller than it used to be as the old fandom gets older. When we first started doing audio book posts, we knew we wouldn't have the resources to fully review them, so we only accepted fics that were already on the site to alleviate that. They became a post based on quality of speaker, since the actual story content was already greenlit to go. The Pre-reader team that used to be 30 strong in 2013 is down to 2-3 actives. Everything else on EQD would just be fixed by increasing my personal workload, but I am not a fanfic reader and terrible at reviewing them.
Vicodin was supposed to be the audio book reviewer, but he burnt out and had real life stuff to deal with. We need a new one, and instead of making you and other audio book recorders wait forever for us to find a new reviewer, we put them in the roundup instead where there isn't any kind of review. Is it the best solution? No. But I can't find anyone interested in doing it and I don't believe I'm qualified to do it.
A lot of this stuff can be fixed just by emailing me. Instead, I find out 5 months later that you were complaining about something and it becomes far too late to do anything about it. This is the first time people have actively sent me a heads up, as I'm actually working with VA's and people who know you recently.
I recently fixed my Youtube subscriptions (they were bugged and not sending emails for older Youtubers for the longest time) prompting the start of the comic dub section. I had no idea there were so many, and while I was wary of giving them single posts for every one, it's great to give them a post when we have 5 coming in every few days. Stuff like this could have been solved ages ago if you just emailed me. I'm not an all-seeing eye. I don't have connections everywhere in the fandom and like most people, only follow specific sections I'm really into personally (art and animation mainly).
For an example of someone who immediately got a solution just by giving me a heads up directly, look at the Mentally Advanced and Rainbow Dash Presents series. I had no idea what they were or how high quality they were and they were being popped into the roundup. When he got in contact with us and showed us directly, we gave him a full on banner for a few days.
You said it yourself, we are only human. EQD even now gets thousands of submissions a week. We can't give every single one the TLC it deserves, and can't do anything about things that aren't coming in at all. Please, just contact me in the future. Add me on Discord. There are so many solutions and mis-understandings here due to this weird format we have of "Sethisto - third party - third party - third party - Scribbler" phone tag we have going on. Your stuff is awesome quality, but it's in a section I just don't personally follow so I need your help to see it.
And of the rejected fanfic people here, I don't know if you will read this comment but I figured I should clarify.
We get a TON of fanfics and have a very small team going through them now days. Unlike other things on EQD, it takes a long time to go through a fic. Even when we had 30 pre-readers actively diving into these, the workload was still insane. There are so many tiny factors in writing that can make or break a story, and we require some basic fanfic guidelines to be met to get it started. If a pre-reader opens a fic and sees grammar issues, they don't have time to go further. They don't have time to edit it for you. If they open it and see basic story writing rules broken or badly done, they don't have time to fix them. If it's a story that has already been done a million times or a topic that just isn't appealing to anyone, they have to move on to others.
Writing well is hard. Writing interesting things is even harder. It's one of the reasons so many fanfics go unread here. Even the clopfic sections sees well written repeats that are completely ignored because people are tired of a topic, and the bar there is porno storyline low.
We can't do much about the wait times, as the PR team is smaller and flood still high. Recruiting more usually results in burnout in a week or two. It's a tough, unforgiving position with a boatload of criticism just due to it's role of being a pseudo-publishing house. They try to pick out the best and most unique, and in doing so end up with tons of dissent from the swarms of people that understandably see their 5 hour writing storm as the gold standard. When you pour yourself into something it sucks to see it rejected by someone. That's the negative of being a creator though. The best writers in the world still face rejection and calls for massive revamps. Look at almost every long-running TV series ever for the kind of criticism writers get. It's one of the hardest fields out there.
Anyway, it's Celestia day. Maybe I'll work with the pre-readers and turn this into a proper editorial. For now, I need to go spam Celestia stuff for the next 10 hours!
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I appreciate your candour Seth. TBH I'm surprised you responded. If I came across as grumpy that might be because of the lack of consistency with no explanation of why. EQD to many is a faceless collective with no one to whom to go when they are unhappy with things. There is a longstanding impression amongst fans that fanfic isn't something EQD particularly wants on it, as evidenced by WandererD's blog ( he puts it far better than I could). That entrenched impression is far reaching, and so any complaints we have about how it and its derivatives are handled feel like they will fall on deaf ears, as they have for years. I know that the only time I ever got more than a single line response was when I tweeted publicly about something. 'The squeaky wheel gets the grease' was said to me at the time and it seemed accurate. Colleagues' and friends' projects for years were mishandled by EQD staff whether they went the legit route or called in favours. History seemed to dictate that trying to change attitudes within would be useless and a waste of energy.
I said in my post that it was motivated by sour grapes. That's true. I'm not going to pretend I had some noble purpose up there. I'm the kind of person who blows her top, cooks off and then moves on. That was all I was thinking I would achieve by venting my frustration.
However, perhaps instead of that we could comme to some mutually acceptable agreement about this? Myself and a couple of other fic readers have considered offering to help make fic reading posts before but we figured, for the aforementioned reasons, it would be pointless and perhaps even rebuffed. If that's not in fact the case, what would you say to that idea?
Also, I shall call off the voles before they shit in your bed. Can't promise about the monkeys though. They're not very obedient.
As someone who arrived (and more or less stayed) in Pony fandom via fan fiction and rarely wanders outside of FimFiction and a few specific artist galleries, it's been interesting to see the reflection of Equestria Daily through the reactions of other people. Given I spend most of my fandom time here, that reaction is mostly negative reactions about fan fiction. Like I said, kind of like seeing the warped reflection of something I have no direct experience with.
Now I'm tempted to start trying to put the video fan fiction stuff on the BMRL again.
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Hello?
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Hey! Sorry I don't email notes on. Just hit me up in email or Discord and we can figure out what to do with fanfic readings :)
4583571 Hey Seth, I don't know if you'll read this... and I'm not sure I have the energy to send an email and we're not Discord buddies... but let me say something.
I love EqD to bits and a lot of my friends work hard there, but the fact that EqD made fics sort of be the "undesirables" unless they have (talented, yes) voice acting is still strong in this part of the fandom.
I'm certainly not claiming any sort of apology is needed (before that pops up) but some acknowledgement that creators here aren't the dregs of the fandom would be nice... hell, you point out that some dude claiming his 5 hour inspiration should be gold vs actual quality is something we're all familiar with here... but giving people the option to opt out of even seeing the "curated" hard work of people that make a real effort and work endlessly on... that really hit hard, bro.
Most of us kept on going, but when you celebrate the rest of the fandom because it's pretty at first glance—however terrible, badly written or downright mediocre the content is sometimes—but we here are a tick on/off? I'm all for joint efforts, just ask anyone on your team that has met me, but just because we write stories, doesn't mean we need additional stuff like a comic or yes even voice acting, to make them worth it.